The RIAA's lawsuit campaign? KISS frontman Gene Simmons says it was run by …

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The bassist and businessman behind the legendary rock band KISS was on hand at the MIPCOM convention in Cannes, France on Tuesday. And Gene Simmons had a message for aspiring entertainers everywhere: sue first, think later.

"Make sure your brand is protected," Simmons warned during a panel discussion. "Make sure there are no incursions. Be litigious. Sue everybody. Take their homes, their cars. Don't let anybody cross that line."

And that includes all those naughty girls and boys with their BitTorrent and Limewire kits. Double for them, in fact.

"The music industry was asleep at the wheel," Simmons complained, "and didn't have the balls to sue every fresh-faced, freckle-faced college kid who downloaded material. And so now we're left with hundreds of thousands of people without jobs. There's no industry."

"No industry" hasn't stopped Simmons from cashing in big; he was at the Cannes event to promote his TV show, Gene Simmons' Family Jewels, now celebrating its 100th episode. From KISS and the TV series, Simmons' enterprise has managed to spin off three thousand products, he bragged.

"Everything from KISS condoms to KISS caskets," Simmons disclosed. "We'll get you coming and we'll get you going. We literally have everything from KISS Hi-Def television sets that are about to come on the market to KISS Motorcycles. Well, it's Planet KISS. Oh, I've already trademarked that, I forgot that."

Gene Simmons on a MIPCOM panel about "branding."

Business is my crack

But back to that "sue every fresh faced, freckle faced" college kid business. We're talking about something close to 60 million P2P downloaders of all ages by the middle of the last decade. And during the height of the Recording Industry Association of America's file-sharing lawsuits, the trade association admitted that these actions were a total money pit. One estimate suggests that RIAA paid its lawyers more than $16 million in 2008 and recouped a paltry $391,000 in infringement settlements (the RIAA pointed out later that its bills for legal work included all sorts of non-P2P work, however).

The RIAA filed 18,000 to 20,000 legal actions; multiply that by every last American P2P user and the bill would be astonishing. The only two cases to proceed through a trial to a verdict have now been tied up in retrials and appeals, a ferociously expensive and laborious process that simply doesn't scale well.

No worries, says Simmons, who obviously sees himself as quite the wheeler-dealer. "Business is my crack," he declared. "That's what motivates me. Getting up every day and doing deals." And so he offered parables to back his logic.

The captain and the fox

"There's a ship that goes across the water," Simmons explained. "The captain is up there and some guy comes up in a sailor suit and says 'Captain! Captain! We have a hole'."

"Well, how big is the hole?" the captain asks.

"Well it's only yea big," the 'guy in the sailor suit' (presumably a sailor) replies. "We'll probably only get in a whole day a glass of water."

"Well," Simmons concluded, "this moron is either going to say don't worry about it, or he's going to plug up that hole then and there." Otherwise: "By the end of that journey that ship will sink."

In case this story didn't clinch the point for Simmons' audience, he rolled out the sad tale of the farmer and the fox.

Once upon a time, he explained, there was a farmer, who noticed that a baby fox was taking an egg from the chicken coop.

The farmer couldn't kill it; the fox was too cute.

"But that little fox went back with a free egg," Simmons warned, "and told all the other little foxes about it, and then the foxes overran the farm, killed all the chickens, took all the eggs, and didn't pay for it."

"Now the farmer lost his farm. His wife divorced him and went with another farmer who was smarter. The kids ran off because the spineless farmer didn't have enough sense to kill the fox. The trucks that delivered the chickens—they're all out of business. The stores that sold them—they're out of business."

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Matthew Lasar
Matt writes for Ars Technica about media/technology history, intellectual property, the FCC, or the Internet in general. He teaches United States history and politics at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Emailmatthew.lasar@arstechnica.com//Twitter@matthewlasar